My husband has spent hours the last few days doing what he most enjoys; working with wood. He bought some undressed pine planks, thicker than dressed, of course, but perfect for what he had in mind. The doors to the larger of the backyard sheds, not my smaller garden shed but his storage shed, didn't fit to his satisfaction; it's a shed he constructed about six years ago and though he prepared the ground under the shed very well by excavating levelling and filling, it settled over the years and the result was that the doors tended to stick and became uneven. So he meant to replace them.

Despite which, on Thursday he insisted in preparing our dinner barbecue-style; baked potatoes and a paprika/olive-oil/cumin-dressed side of rainbow trout. I had only to prepare the salad and fresh fruit for dessert. And on Friday, again, he proposed used the barbecue, and because he's so curious about the limits to its use, which seem non-existent actually, he once again did chicken breasts dressed with lemon juice, oregano, basil, and garlic, and like the fish, they turned out wonderfully moist and delicious.

He had also decided he'd like to try baking bannock bread on the barbecue, so I prepared the dough, and he baked the biscuits in a cast-iron frypan, sitting on a brick on top of the briquettes, lid closed. It took them a half-hour to bake and brown nicely; he tended to his sawing of wood and dinner, alternately. I'd baked a blueberry pie from frozen berries in the morning and put a chicken soup on to cook as well. Then all I had to do was put together a salad of (microwaved) cauliflower, cocktail tomatoes, snap peas and sliced cucumber.

Summer does spell easy living. Even though the temperature last night dropped to the freezing mark. Leaving me grateful that the garden weathered that drop; quite the contrast to last week's 30-degree daytime temperatures.